He's for Individual Responsibility, so He Must Be Stopped Now!

Jordan Peterson (Channel 4 News via YouTube)

Clara Fox reports at National Review,

Canadian professor Jordan Peterson has been tarred as a racist for ridiculing the concepts of white privilege and white guilt.

Canada’s most famous psychologist has mesmerized millions on YouTube, written a best-seller, and spoken to sold-out crowds on a world tour that promises not to end any time soon. Like any celebrity, he has his detractors, and some of them are trying to destroy his reputation with a single word: racist.

…Instead of unpacking his arguments and seeing where (if anywhere) he goes wrong, his critics on the left say Peterson, who dares attack their views of gender and white guilt, is one step removed from a white supremacist or similar to notable fascists.

…The race to accuse Peterson of racism is tied to his views on white privilege (he calls it an abhorrent idea) and white guilt (he calls it racist). On March 5, hundreds of protesters attempted to drown out a lecture Peterson was giving on compelled speech at Queen’s University in Canada, chanting “F**k white supremacy” and “Shame on racism.” During the lecture, Peterson argued, as he often does, against group-identity politics, a subject that encompasses the theory of white privilege.

Peggy McIntosh, a Harvard graduate and professor of women’s studies, was one of the first to publish on white privilege. She wrote in a 1988 paper that her privilege had made her an oppressor, and lamented that her “schooling gave [her] no training in seeing [herself] as an oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged person.” Being white not only benefited her group, she argued, it oppressed other races, as evidenced by the fact, for example, that she could “talk with my mouth full and not have people put this down to [her] race.” Such privilege, she argues, “simply confers dominance, gives permission to control.” She alludes to the notion of hierarchy as oppressive but then offers no solution, except to urge white people to feel guilty.

Peterson mocked this paper last year during a lecture for the University of British Columbia Free Speech Club. He said McIntosh’s list of 46 privileges enjoyed by white people could apply to different groups of people in different countries, which means that privilege doesn’t have anything to do with being white or even with race but with being wealthy or being the majority. He argued further during his Queen’s lecture that the radical Left has yet to realize that their insistence on dealing with groups, instead of individuals, will leave them in the comedic position of dividing their group identities continually (as in the case of the LGBT community, who continue to add letters to their acronym) until they finally arrive at the individual, the ultimate minority.

“It turns out we don’t fit into one group, any of us, we fit into multiple groups and it’s not obvious at all which groups should be of paramount importance,” he said, noting that people can be divided by race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic class, intelligence, personality, etc. The individual is the most important entity, he argued. When group-identity politics disappears, we “meet soul to soul, so to speak, and we meet in a situation where we hold sole responsibility for our actions.” Meeting the individual as an individual and not as a member of a certain group will allow for real multiculturalism, instead of the great danger of tribalism, he said.

Peterson not only rejects the notion of white privilege but finds in it a logic that can be used to justify violence against the supposed oppressor group. His main problem with it (and with many similar inventions) lies in his belief that the individual, and not the group, should carry guilt; anything else, he argues, is racism. “The idea that you can target an ethnic group with a collective crime, regardless of the specific innocence or guilt of the constituent elements of that group — there is absolutely nothing that’s more racist than that. It’s absolutely abhorrent,” he said.

He argues that the victim-status mentality can lead (and often has led) to genocide. He refers to the treatment of the so-called kulaks in the Soviet Union in the 1920s: “They were the most productive element of the agricultural strata in Russia. And they were virtually all killed, raped, and robbed by the collectivists who insisted that because they showed signs of wealth, they were criminals and robbers.”

Still, Peterson doesn’t let anyone off the hook. He acknowledges that those who enjoy wealth today have come by it largely as a consequence of “historical catastrophe” — a reality that should motivate you to “work to deserve” these privileges, which will in turn make the world a better place for everyone. (He does, after all, have a penchant for telling people to grow the hell up and take responsibility.) “But not necessarily [because] you are any more guilty personally — you’re guilty as hell personally! — but so is everyone else. That’s the critical thing. So is everyone else.”

During the Q&A portion of a lecture Peterson gave in Los Angeles in January, a man in the crowd asked how Peterson responds to those who say he is starting a cult. His short answer summed up his philosophy nicely: “Can you have a cult of individuals?”

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